


Frames

by Blackbird Song (Blackbird_Song)



Category: Shelter (2007)
Genre: Character Study, Choices, Introspection, M/M, Yuletide 2014
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-22
Updated: 2014-12-22
Packaged: 2018-03-02 19:47:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2823908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blackbird_Song/pseuds/Blackbird%20Song
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zach has to reframe everything if he's going to get it right.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Frames

**Author's Note:**

  * For [carryokee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/carryokee/gifts).



> Dear carryokee,
> 
> I love this movie and adored this assignment, even with the short notice. You gave me a wonderful prompt and I hope I've done it some justice.

_Colors are the deeds and sufferings of light. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe_

"How come everything on your side is gray?"

"I like black and white." Zach doesn't look up from his sketchbook, even though he knows he can't sketch anything tonight.

"How come?"

"It's more industrial." Zach closes his sketchbook. "Strong, clean lines and shapes. Nothing gets in the way."

"My caterpillar's got strong lines." Cody picks it up and traces the demarcations between segments.

"Yeah, but all you see is the color. If you make a shape and don't color it, you can put it anywhere, do anything you want with it." Zach draws the outline of the caterpillar without legs or segments. "What does that look like?"

"A big pill."

Zach draws a sort of backward-pointing, slightly rounded triangle on the top edge of it. "How 'bout now?"

Cody looks at it, turning his head to process it. "Maybe a shark."

Zach draws a V shape slanting down and forward from the middle of pill.

"That's a plane!"

"Yup," says Zach, drawing the Vincent Thomas Bridge underneath it.

"It's night time," Cody says. "The blue lights should be on."

"Not if it's after midnight."

"But it's not after midnight! It's seven thirty."

"Okay, then you get to draw the blue lights." Zach fishes out his blue Prismacolor. "Gently, okay? This is expensive."

Cody braces himself against Zach's side, leaving Zach no choice but to wrap an arm around him. Not that he minds, because Cody is amazing. But if he had a choice, Zach wouldn't be here. He'd have taken the slot at CalArts instead of shutting that down. 

He doesn't have a choice, though. 

"What about the red ones?"

"I don't have a red pencil anymore."

"Can we get one tomorrow?"

"I have work." Zach can't tell Cody that he broke that pencil into pieces when he turned down CalArts or that he reserves red for art performed anywhere but in his room.

*****

_I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way — things I had no words for. ~Georgia O'Keeffe_

Zach gazes at the back of a shirt he ruined at the beginning of a life that slipped out of his grasp. He'd thought for a few blissful weeks that he could take that life, but Jeanne is making that impossible. He looks at the muddy red stains on that green cloth – so like Shaun's eyes in firelight – and remembers getting the paint hours after their first time. It had to be non-toxic for Cody, so spray paint was out. His ass was sore, his heart was throbbing and his life opened up to color. 

He could do red again. He could bring red into his half of the room instead of mentally graying out the stuff on Cody's side. He could even appreciate that stupid caterpillar. 

He'd started with a rectangle in the corner. He wasn't sure if he wanted to keep his state of mind a secret or proclaim it to the world, to his world. To Cody and Jeanne and Dad. But all that went away when he looked at it and saw that it needed closure, so he painted another rectangle on the wall near his bedpost. And then he went back to the corner and knew that he wanted to make a journey of red rectangles from there to the one he'd just made. Then he highlighted the cranes behind his bed because he loved them and Shaun had noticed his tags. And the red needed to be on his bed, too, because it was bed with Shaun that made red possible again.

Half the red from the bed ended up on the shirt he's holding in his hands when Shaun called him just as he was finishing up and he leaned back against the headboard because Shaun melted him.

Shaun melted him because Shaun got him. Shaun got his art and the way he has to express the things that can't be thought coherently, let alone said. So instead of cursing Shaun for calling and making him ruin a shirt, he wore it the next time he spent the night there without Cody as proof that art was interpersonal and transient. 

And so is life.

His life is changing in ways he isn't sure he can handle. He's handling it because he doesn't have a choice. He doesn't want to get left like Jeanne. 

He'd rather do the leaving.

*****

_All art requires courage. ~Anne Tucker_

"It's a choice, Zach," Shaun had said.

"You are just a summer fuck, okay? You have reduced yourself to a little piece of ass, so bravo, you are doing _really_ well for yourself!" Jeanne had said.

"Are you a faggot?" Pretty much everyone had said that.

"Where's my princess big brother?" and "You got a guy in there, you slut?" Gabe had said.

All of these ring in Zach's ears as the rest of the world falls silent while a nameless guy with a roller filled with toxic beige paint obliterates the life he painted in black and white and red – with just that hint of gray-blue peeking through from the first tag he'd sprayed there months before.

He stands there, even though it feels like standing is impossible and his legs might turn to paint thinner. He stands there and forces himself to watch his life being wiped out. He can't have that life. He has no choice. He has to take Cody and Jeanne won't let Cody be anywhere near Shaun. He can't go back to Tori because it isn't fair to her and he can't love her like a husband should. He needs to tell her the truth, but he'll wait until his life has been painted away.

With each swipe of beige, he tries to forget the sensations of that life he'll never have: 

Shaun kissing him on the balcony in the middle of the night.

Shaun going down on him that first, incredible time.

Shaun holding him through nights when he couldn't sleep.

Shaun's ass clenching around his dick so hard he saw stars as he came.

The taste and feel of Shaun's uncut dick in his mouth.

Holding Shaun through a nightmare one night and kissing away the tear that spilled during it.

The taste of their first drunken kiss.

The taste of their first sober one.

It takes the nameless man twenty minutes to roll paint over the mural it had taken him an hour to tag.

It took Zach five minutes to obliterate a relationship that he loved more than anything or anyone else in life, except Cody.

It takes a conversation with Tori – and a night sleeping at her place without any thought or hope of fucking her – to recognize what an absolute prick he's been to Shaun. It takes her shaking him – literally – to grab himself by the balls to go to Shaun and ask for his help. 

Nobody can help Zach with the abject terror of knowing that he has to let Shaun share the responsibility of keeping the family that's forming together. This is Zach's problem and he's pretty sure he's going to fuck it up a lot. He's also warned Tori that he may be calling her a lot, and she's told him that she'll always remind him that Shaun's a good man and that she'll be happy to help him sometimes.

On their first anniversary, Zach presents Shaun with a shadowbox showcasing his ruined green shirt against a piece of his old headboard that's missing some red in the rectangles. Underneath it he has written, using a tiny brush dipped in small pools of red spray paint:

_It has been said that art is a tryst, for in the joy of it maker and beholder meet. ~Kojiro Tomita_

**Author's Note:**

> Artist Ryan Graeff painted the amazing mural in the movie in about an hour, so I've used that time in this fic. It was depressing to discover that the film crew were required to paint the thing beige again that same day. The time-lapse sequence of the mural being painted features Ryan Graeff rather than Trevor Wright, who quips in the commentary that he's about 6'3" in that sequence. (Wright's listed height is 5'9".)
> 
> I love Yuletide for making me learn these things. :-)


End file.
